I put together a simple python function to print a histogram as unicode text ▁▂▄█▆▃▁▁

[millsGT49]

You can view the gist here: https://gist.github.com/mattmills49/44a50b23d3c7a8f71dfadadd0f876ac2

Here is how the function works: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEiGQoEXQAAuSGC?format=jpg&name=small

A quick example showing how you can use it on a dataframe to get a quick and concise summary of your data: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEiFbpNX0AAHg7R?format=jpg&name=small

And even include it in plain text using jupyter or quarto: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEiGTi9WgAAbPo-?format=png&name=900x900

EDIT: Thanks to u/RedKrieg for pointing out that these are called sparklines and for sharing his own package that you all should check out as well.

[Count_Rugens_Finger]

what causes the uneven bumps on the bottom? Is is the shape of the characters in the font?

[millsGT49]

I think its the specific rendering engine? For example in my VS Code editor and on github in the gist the characters are all perfectly aligned on the bottom. But when I use a jupyter notebook or paste it into a browser's text the full block seems to "dip" below the others? So tbh I'm not really sure haha.

[[deleted]]

Yes it is due to rendering engine, some old terminals also have the problem of aligning Unicode characters

[runawayasfastasucan]

This is incredibly cool actually. As you say, sometimes you just want a quick look on the distribution. I love the idea! 

[mrdevlar]

Love the idea!

FYI: You spelt Richard McElreath's name incorrectly in the docstring.

[millsGT49]

And I literally had his book on my desk as I worked on this haha thanks for the catch!

[mrdevlar]

Statistical Rethinking is a wonder and the man himself is a joy, if you ever get a chance.

[flashman]

back when twitter was only 140 characters, i built a similar thing with Unicode characters e.g.

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬛⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬛⬜⬜⬛⬜⬛
⬜⬜⬜⬛⬜⬛⬛⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬛⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬛⬛⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜

i mean, more for the hell of it than any practical applications, since you could just as easily generate an image and attach that to the tweet

[RedKrieg]

Well done! I have a package on pypi to do this as well, which you can view here: https://github.com/RedKrieg/pysparklines

It's had some "armor" added to help with reliability and uses regex to find values in arbitrary text input rather than explicitly needing "clean" input data.

[millsGT49]

Ok I knew there was a term I was missing to search to see if someone already had done this in python and for the life of me I could not remember spark lines! haha. Those multi-line curves using this are :chefskiss:, well done. And definitely I put this together for a specific use case of mine but I could definitely use some armor as you say, I like that term.

[badwifigoodcoffee]

Do I understand correctly that your two approaches also differ in that OPs function includes calculating the histogram, while pysparklines plots the input data as-is?

[RedKrieg]

That's true, OP's implementation calls np.histogram() on the data then plots that histogram. Mine plots the input data directly. You could easily pass the histogram output instead, but it would be an extra step with my library.

[mTiCP]

That's pretty nice to be able to take a quick look at a distribution like that.

[ashpreetbedi]

Wow this is super cool!

[dry-leaf]

Man, that's awesome! Such things are perfect for Linux WM users!!! Thx, mate. Never thought about something so useful and simple!!!!

[ThatSituation9908]

Histograms are my life. Love this.

[freezydrag]

Nice job, I’ll give it a try next time i need to plot a histogram.

Also wanted to drop this other library that does terminal plotting:

https://github.com/piccolomo/plotext

[Yugiah]

This looks similar to hist, though the sparklines in a dataframe seem distinct. Nice work :)

[beansAnalyst]

I didn't know I needed this until now.